


In Alien Soil

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Sixth Doctor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 21:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11388666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Peri and the Doctor discuss botany, and the Doctor remembers what interests her.





	In Alien Soil

**Author's Note:**

> Written for who-@-50 and currently unbetaed, because I wanted to get it up in good time. Probably influenced by "The Sky Was Good For Flying," by Doyle.

"It's bleak," Peri said. "Beautiful, too, in its way." A hasty addition, so that she wouldn't have to endure indignant repetitions of _bleak_ for the next minute. "But still . . ."

They were on a mountain trail, looking over a pure black forest. Peri had examined the leaves of several trees, and they weren't that different from earthly deciduous foliage; only the color was obviously alien. Under the light of a looming red sun, with nothing but wind and some clicking insect for background noise, it made the place thoroughly funereal and a bit spooky.

Of course, the figure ahead of her took a bit of the somberness out of the scene. In this setting, in his usual colors, the Doctor managed to achieve near-perfect anti-camouflage. _"Solemn,_ I should think," he opined. "Fuliginous, definitely. Or umbral. And certainly boreal. But I wouldn't say _bleak."_

"So, synonyms for black, then?" Peri said sweetly, and got herself glared at. He didn't deny it, and Peri decided to count it as her point. "What's 'boreal' doing in there?"

"The sub-arctic and sub-antarctic forests of Gallifrey turn almost this shade in deep winter."

"What color are they the rest of the time?"

There was a rather large rock in the trail. The Doctor pulled himself up it by grabbing a sapling. Peri, who had gotten rashes from more kinds of alien poison ivy than would exist in any just universe, scrabbled up without the assistance. "Silver," the Doctor said, annoyingly not out of breath. "Quite striking compared to other planets. When the skies are clear, the forests positively blaze."

Peri frowned. "Silver? Isn't that too reflective for photosynthesis?"

"Oh, the silver isn't there for photosynthesis. For many trees, the bark has taken over that function entirely"

"What's it there for, then?"

"A marvel of evolutionary ecology!" This was accompanied by a gesture very like a preacher getting carried away by his words—which was, Peri thought, accurate enough, in a sense. "You see," the Doctor confided, "in your time, human science has only taken its first steps, the tiniest toe-dabbling in the vast and turbulent sea of ecological understanding. You envision forests, fields, and fauna as mere passengers, bowing to the inevitable whim of ruthless climate, a force utterly unmoved by life or anything that life can produce."

Peri sorted through this. "That's not quite true," she said. "There's nuclear winter. That would be life tampering with the climate in a big way."

"Exactly!" He turned briefly to beam back at her.

Peri sighed. "Now I really don't know what you're getting at," she admitted.

"What makes a nuclear winter cold?"

"Well—the bombs would fall—"

"Yes?"

"—throwing dust into the air, blocking out the sun—"

"Which would lower the mean temperature for a number of years, yes, but what keeps it that way afterward?"

"Snow?"

"Snow, altering the albedo of the entire planet, reflecting life-giving light back into space. Chilling the world even after the dust from the dust-up has drifted back to earth. But! If such an effect were finely tuned, regulated, one could control the climate of a given planet to within degrees. And, as your scientists will someday learn, an ecosystem has its own means of self-correction, growing ever-more intricate as the planet ages, to the point where any given biome reacts as if it were acting, with intelligence, in its own best interests. Or, as Clarke might have it, sufficiently advanced ecology is indistinguishable from planning. The silver forests of Gallifrey control the weather, with prodigious accuracy. When they darken, they warm the planet; when they intensify their reflectivity, they cool it. And they evolved that way on their own."

"That's _fascinating."_ And for once, Peri wasn't being the slightest bit sarcastic in saying it. Plants that optimized their own growing conditions . . . "I don't suppose we could go there?"

The ebullience drained out of the Doctor rather as if a plug had been pulled, and Peri was instantly sorry she had asked. "Possibly," he said. "Perhaps. The sticking point, as always, is the Time Lords. Conclaves of Time Lords. Convocations of Time Lords. Arguments of Time Lords, very likely . . ."

"An egotism of Time Lords?" Peri put in innocently.

The Doctor turned all the way around. "Egotism?"

"Well, I thought we were deciding what a group of Time Lords should be called."

_"Egotism?!"_

~~~~~~~~

The Most Benevolent Queen of Krontep, her majesty Queen Peri the First, had her own garden, and it was bigger than some cities. There were political reasons for it, of course—employment, scientific advancement, the new opportunities provided by trading with offworlders rather than hitting them on the head—but she had started it for her own pleasure, scientific and aesthetic.

It was early morning, nine years into her reign, and she was strolling through the orchard when she heard a raised voice. It sounded like Callont. On other worlds, Callont would have been a gardener, or a chief gardener, but this was Krontep and he styled himself Callont, Dread Overlord of Trees. You learned to put up with a certain amount of title inflation.

You also learned to pause prudently, well back from the altercation, and listen to make sure that no weapons had been deployed yet. Peri didn't hear clashing steel, so she hurried between the bushy _cluath_ trees. If she was lucky, whatever-this-was could be defused with a few stern words and she wouldn't have to put up with a concussed Dread Overlord of Trees or even _try_ to keep a straight face through the phrase _grievously injured in a shovel duel,_ which was, as far as Peri was concerned, worth solid platinum.

The next word she heard was, _"Peasant?!"_ High-pitched with indignation. Super-saturated with outrage. And definitely not Callont.

Peri broke into a sprint.

She pulled up short and composed herself right before she shoved through the hedge. "Callont," she said as she emerged, as coolly as she could, "this man is my guest. Give us a few minutes, would you?"

Callont came down off his tiptoes—he had been nose-to-nose with the intruder—and stepped away, still visibly seething. "My Queen," he gritted, and then bent to pick up the pitchfork that he'd abandoned on the very-nearly-grass. He stalked toward her, pressed it into her hand, and growled, _"You might need this,"_ in a tone that made any elaboration—such as _for stabbing people—_ entirely redundant.

Peri fought very hard not to smile. "Thank you, Callont."

"What a vexatious little man," the Doctor observed. Loud enough for Callont to hear. On purpose.

This time, there was no suppressing the smile even if Peri had wanted to. "Hello, Doctor."

"Yes, well." He looked uncomfortable. "I was trying to get to your wedding, but there appears to be a temporal interdict."

"You wouldn't have liked it. Lots of spit-roasted meat of uncertain origin. And number of legs. Temporal interdict?"

"Oh, I'm sure I would have been bored to tears, but I didn't want to miss it. And temporal interdict is a sort of lock that the Time Lords impose when they know that the timelines are too tangled for safe handling and they have reason to suspect someone might try anyway."

Peri let out her breath. "You mean, like taking me home."

"I can't."

"I understand."

"I truly can't. Peri—you were _dead._ That timeline might have been invalidated, but it still existed, for lack of a better verb and a tense to put it in. That makes your timeline—complicated. And people who are complicated in that particular fashion don't mix well with time travel. It would be unworkable even if the Time Lords didn't field a group of unusually twisty-minded and humorless agents dedicated solely to preventing this sort of thing."

"Doctor, I understand. Really." Not that she had been all right at first, but—nine years. You could adjust in nine years. And she had Yrcanos, who might not entirely understand why his wife preferred a trowel to a nice spiky mace but was stubbornly determined to be proud of her garden because she thought it worthwhile, and had surprised himself by becoming more interested than he expected. Also, he had once knocked a warrior unconscious with a candlestick for insinuating that botany was anything less than a queenly calling. She didn't want to leave him, there was no-one on Earth who couldn't manage without her, and the thought of Yrcanos adjusting to Earth—was slightly more terrifying than funny even if Peri could persuade him to abandon his responsibilities, which she couldn't. Peri sat down on one of the ubiquitous benches and beckoned the Doctor over. "What happened to you?"

The answer was unusually slow in coming. "I don't know."

"What?"

"It's all a muddle. Memory is always unreliable when it comes to future selves. Or even future fragments of self, aspects or distillations or reflections or, one dearly hopes, roads not taken. The short answer is that the average Time Lord is more veteratorian and vicious than any de Medici and I shan't be having them round for tea."

"Oh, I don't know," Peri said. "I've known good ones."

That won a genuine smile from him, thank goodness. Bombast might make her roll her eyes, but Peri only _worried_ about the Doctor when he was dispirited.

"I brought you something," the Doctor said abruptly. "I intended it as a wedding present, but—circumstances failed to align."

"You're practically falling over yourself to apologize," Peri observed, "for you, anyway. You must have really missed me."

"Oh, I do. I'm about to be forced into companionship by paradox avoidance. Paradox avoidance! And she has the most dreadful taste in food."

"So you have things to bicker about already! It's always nice to have common interests."

"Yes, take pleasure in my pain, why don't you." But the corners of his mouth twitched, just a little bit. "Still, that sorrowful fate remains in my future—for an increasingly addled definition of the word. At any rate, come see your wedding present."

Peri followed him around the hedge, and saw instantly why her Dread Overlord of Trees had been so furious. The Doctor had evidently chosen a spot that suited him and just started digging, without regard to what Callont or anyone else might think. There was a row of potted saplings standing by the holes.

Their trunks reminded Peri of eucalyptus deglupta—rainbow eucalyptus, which looked like an color-mad Impressionist's idea of trees—only these trees tended slightly more toward a rich, dark burgundy. The leaves ran in an even row down the sides of the branches, before clustering at the ends of twigs like normal trees. It made them look, Peri thought, a little bit like feathers on a wing. And they glittered in Krontep's morning sun like—like jewels. Or polished mirrors.

They looked like fairy plants; graceful, sparkling, barely believable next to the mundane green of the hedge. Peri whispered, _"Ohhh . . ."_

"Northern paintwood," the Doctor said. "Not the grandest or most storied of species, but the one most likely to survive in alien soil. You would have the only copse off of Gallifrey. I wrote some instructions . . ."

"They're _beautiful._ You remembered!"

"Ah, so they meet with the Queen's approval, then." He was definitely smiling again.

"I love them," Peri said. "Thank you."

The Doctor looked for an instant as if he were going to deflect that the way he usually did, to say _a mere trifle for a magnificent intellect such as my own,_ or something else that would get him out of directly acknowledging that he was deliberately being nice. But instead, he met her eyes and said, "You're welcome."


End file.
